Wednesday, July 7, 2010

So being lazy pays off - I no longer have to write an indepth analysis of the feral trees, because they're all being nuked to hell. Yes, it's shocking that during the beta things would change so much.

But one bit of interesting news here is the notion that all classes will have their spec-defining ability given to them early on in their life, at level 10 when they choose their specialization. That got me thinking - what really is the defining trait for ferals?

The only one I could really think of was Mangle. Mangle is the thing you build towards that is amazingly rewarding at level 50, and allows you to plow through mobs like butter for the next 15 levels. It was defining for bears and cats, sounds great, and does satisfying damage and threat. It's obviously not the top-DPS thing for cats, but at least from a leveling experience it's all about Mangle.

Now there are other defining abilities too, but that's the big one. I think that if I wanted to get people used to feral abilities early, I'd give them something like this:

Bear:

Mangle

Swipe

Barkskin

Savage Defense

Growl

Bearform

Cat:

Mangle

Rake

Savage Roar

Tiger's Fury

Catform

and maybe the combo of Pounce/Ravage or one of the two.

The nice thing is that this would allow for the completely lame claw to be removed entirely. And get you forms early, which has always been an annoyance.

As far as the end game goes, I don't think this really is going to matter. They've said repeatedly that the dps, utility, rotation, tanking skill or healing skill is not going to change; this is almost entirely a leveling and utilitarian cleanup. It might affect how you get that awesome other talent in another tree, but I even doubt that. It'll affect PvP, but I honestly don't care about PvP, so I'm not going to talk about that :) Still, it'll be nice to see the new trees and hopefully get some rebalancing of the bear/cat talents. And maybe some of them will actually be functional!

I think having a reasonably lackluster talent like mangle as our 'class defining ability' is pretty indicative that design has no idea what they're doing with feral. Other classes get things like Mortal Strike, Penance, and Titan Grip. We get something that's used once per minute (or not at all if you have a mangle bot) and something that is an unexciting part of a boring tanking rotation.

Don't forget Boomkins are going to be getting eclipse and maybe starfire at 10. GC has stated that resto will have some tools as well so they won't be left out.

As far as leather with int goes, they have fixed old world quest rewards and drops to be inline with new stats. Claw won't be useful anymore as Boomkins and resto's can be useful with out going into cat form.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.